Office of Special Plans
During the days before the Iraq invasion, the Bush administration knew a number of things about Iraq. They knew, for instance, that Saddam Hussein was working toward acquiring nuclear weapons. They knew that Saddam had huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. They knew that Saddam worked closely with Osama bin Laden, and in fact had helped mastermind the Attacks on America. All the Bush patriots lacked was the evidence. So, in September of 2002, Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Special Plans to get that very evidence -- whether it existed or not. The Donald tapped his close friend and Real American Patriot Douglas Feith to oversee the new office. "What we need," Rumsfeld told Feith, "is a way to get the really truthy material out to the American people. Americans are the greatest people in the world -- as long as they vote Republican, anyway -- but they're easily confused. We don't want any evidence that contradicts what we already know to get in the way." "Heck, old Dick Cheney has been planning an Iraq invasion for ten years...can't let the stupid naysayers to screw it up now." So Feith got himself an office in the Pentagon and began looking for staff. Gathering the Team and Finding Truthy Sources Feith quickly settled on a fair and balanced team of scholars with extensive experience in neoconservative intelligence. *Abram N. Shulsky, the heavyset Professor of Political Advertising and advocate of the "noble lie" -- the notion that deception is morally acceptable when used by a wise but misunderstood elite -- served as office manager and master manipulator. *John Trigilio, who quit the Defense Intelligence Agency in a huff because the DIA would not accept the existence of pixies, was a source handler charged with getting Arabs drunk enough to say anything, and often drunk enough to throw up on the waitresses. *Ladan Archin, the short-but-smelly graduate of the School of Advanced International Propaganda who had once served as Paul Wolfowitz's private hen-teaser, did most of the report-writing. But the OSP faced an apparently insurmountable hurdle: rogue liberal agencies like the CIA and DIA had monopolized sources of intelligence on Iraq. And those sources weren't giving the administration the factiness they needed to justify invading Iraq and protecting the Iraqi oil-production facilities. The existing sources just weren't doing the job. It wasn't long, however, before the OSP found the man who would become the lynchpin of their source network. Ahmed Chalabi had been discounted by the CIA as "unreliable to the point of insanity" and "willing to sell his mother for ten bucks, and do a camel on stage for fifty". He was a convicted felon, a high-stakes financial con man, a political opportunist who presented himself as an Iraqi insider but who had not visited Iraq for 20 years, and a pathological liar. In short, he fit right in with the neoconservatives at the OSP. In a secret ceremony the OSP staff inducted Chalabi into the Inner Circle of Bush Loyalists. For the purposes of the initiation they borrowed Don Rumsfeld's pet lamprey, Sweet-Teeth, and allowed it to suck Chalabi's brain. While Chalabi passed the torture test, the lamprey was not so fortunate. It died only a few hours later, overcome by the poisons sloshing around in Chalabi's cranium. Down to Business: Creating Factiness Within months the intelligence warriors at Douglas Feith's OSP had produced reams of really truthy material supporting the Bush administration's predefined knowledge. These discoveries included: :*Saddam Hussein's purchase of Nigerian yellowcake uranium, a finding that indicated the factiness of the claim that Saddam was building nuclear weapons. :*The discovery of aluminum tubes of a type which could only be used for processing nuclear material. :*Identification of hundreds of mobile biological warfare laboratories -- vans misleadingly marked with slogans like "Baghdad's Finest Laundry, Burkhas Our Speciality" and "Abdullah's Traveling Camel Hygiene Service". :*Hundreds of personal meetings between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, at which the two evildoers played "grab the cupcake" until well after midnight. :*The existence of several Ba'ath-run terrorist sports camps in northeastern Iraq, where Al Qaeda members learned such deadly soccer techniques as lateral passing, heading the ball, and biting the opposition's noses. The OSP presented their findings to the President, his cabinet, Maury Povich, the Congress, the press, Oprah, and -- of course -- the kingpin, Stephen Colbert. All patriotic American cheered. Mission Accomplished And so the American bombers took off, the tanks rolled in, and Operation Iraq Liberation hit the ground running. The Americans quickly seized the crucial oil infrastructure and the presidential palaces, leaving the armories of Saddam's army to be looted by the grateful populace. Unfortunately, in a final spasm of vindictiveness Saddam Hussein personally erased all traces of his weapons of mass destruction and his nuclear warfare apparatus. He flushed all records of his dealings with Al Qaeda and bin Laden down the toilet. He scurried out of Baghdad and personally tore down the incriminating terrorist camps. Thus bumbling investigations by the CIA, the Army, Congress, British MI6, and every other intelligence agency in the world have found no physical evidence that any of the OSP's claims were anything more than the manipulative fantasies of charlatans. Finally the Bush administration itself formed a special committee to investigate the factiness of the OSP's work. The committee consisted of Dick Cheney's hunting dog, Patches, who had recently helped Mr. Cheney shoot one of his buddies in the face. It was a good dog, and it made a real good committee. When asked if it could name one single case in which the OSP was mistaken, it said nothing. The President deemed the OSP truthy as all get-out, and ordered medals of honor for all concerned.